When I first heard about this, the story went that it was a group of actual strippers in his town that was behind it, and they would approach him in person with innocent enquiries and then reveal themselves to be strippers. Or something like that.

I'm going to start off by saying that sexual harassment is wrong, and if someone is doing something or saying something that makes you uncomfortable, that's a horrible thing.

That being said, the thing that always stands out to me in sexual harassment policies is the wording choice of "unwelcome". Now, it makes perfect sense, if you and your mate have an agreement between each other to send dirty pictures to each other, and nobody else is exposed to them, then there should be no problem there. The problem with the broadening of the definitions is that how do you find out if something is unwelcome to someone? If the definition becomes so broad, how to you even ask someone "hey, I've got this bit of porno I think you might like, do you want to see it?" Even that statement, under sufficiently broad definitions could be determined to be sexual harassment? The other person can't even be pro-active to you, under the same fear "I wouldn't mind if you showed me some porno"... nup, harassment there too.

So if everyone she talked to on the phone started every conversation with "By the way, I'll be recording this phone call for my own records" would she ditch taking phone calls too? What about if every piece of snail mail and fax had a note at the start stating it too, had a copy kept for records, would she ditch them? Maybe if enough people did it, she could be pushed away from all forms of communication?

The problem I see is that this might only protect large companies, which I'll admit are the most common targets for patent trolls. Small companies, like start ups, who might not even have their own patents, will still be facing lawsuits that would be crippling to the business to defend. It won't really matter if you get paid back your lawyers fees for defending if your business is bankrupted before then.

If the course she would have to do in order to become certified does not cover the braiding she wants to do, then surely the logical conclusion is that the certification does not cover that style of braiding, and is therefore not required?

Seriously, who honestly thinks that Wikipedia, Reddit and others are shutting down their sites to "further their corporate interests?"

I can clearly see that shutting down your own site is furthering your own corporate interests, just like not offering movies for rental for 2 months after release for sale is furthering their own corporate interests, the similarities are there.

I wonder, given that virtually every industry is saying "social media is the advertising of the future", when the advertising industry will start to complain that things like Facebook are killing their business? Obviously, there is advertising on Facebook, but if they're losing those lucrative TV dollars because companies start thinking they're better served putting their money into social media, which might not even be handled by the advertising company!

I realise that the record labels and the RIAA are virtually indistinguishable from each other, but the thing I find interesting is it is never usually an individual label that is doing the suing, it is the RIAA. So when a top employee of a label tells said label that what the RIAA is doing is wrong and counter-productive, why is the response to trust in the RIAA and not their own over-paid employee?

Given that people tend to watch the news that reflects their views, and not watch news that doesn't, I don't really see how this means anything at all anyway. If all the tv/newspaper etc news in an area is putting forward one point of view, then people who agree will read it and say "yes, you're right!" and people who don't will either not read it, or read it and say "no, that's complete BS!"

Wait wait wait, I think you're missing the most disturbing part of that ruling, as I read it anyway.

Apparently, it is ok, because the GPS never reported a position that wasn't a public place. That's how I read that little snippet. So apparently, so long as it's only reporting the public places (like a street, or outside an address) that's ok? But if it reported a private place (like the inside of a private garage) then it would be bad? Given that cars rarely tend to go to truly private places (parked on the street, public parking, etc) that means there is apparently no grounds at all for a GPS placed on a car to be an invasion of privacy?

I actually read another article on this story last night (was on ITNews.com.au, don't have a link) where they were saying that the filter was not going to be using the ACMA blacklist, but rather the Interpol list. I actually have a better time accepting that list, as my impression (without research) is that it is maintained by international law enforcement, rather then governments. It has it's flaws (for example, definition of "underage" has been done "by comittee" and so is therefore 13, not the 18 it commonly is in Australia and other countries) but I see it as being a kind of neutral 3rd party, rather then something controlled and run by our government, who definitely have a vested interested in what the people see in the media.
I am a little concerned that Telstra might decide to start filtering the internet for their wholesale customers as well, thus ISPs who actually don't wish to enforce this filter on their customers will end up doing so simply because they use Telstras hardware. Although I'm not entirely sure that's how it can work, so feel free to point out my error any techs out there.

Blocking by country is, I assume, done by IP address. Certain countries have certain IP addresses that they use, so if you block that range, you block that country. Simple enough to get around with proxies in other countries. But that was IPv4.
IPv6, from what I know about it, assigns "IP"s based on the devices MAC address (as well as some random number for security/privacy purposes). Because of this, and the size of the IPv6 address range, the doling out of IP addresses by IANA is quite simply unnecessary. Thus, there will presumably be no "country range" of IP's. Thus these country blocking attempts will quite simply STOP WORKING once we finally make the big switch over to IPv6 (which despite the fact that we officially ran out of IPv4 addresses sometime last year, is probably still ages away).